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Honeywell will halt Onondaga Lake dredging for the season on Saturday

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Honeywell will shut down its Onondaga Lake dredging operations on Saturday for the winter. About 1.2 million cubic yards of lake bottom have been removed so far -- about 60 percent of the projected total.
(Mike Greenlar | mgreenlar@syracuse.com)

Honeywell has hauled out more than 1.2 million cubic yards of lake bottom since dredging began last year, said Honeywell spokeswoman Victoria Streitfeld. That's about 60 percent of the projected 2 million cubic yards the company expects to extract by 2015.

Dredging has to be shut down when it gets too cold to operate water-cooled machinery and too dangerous for workers to move around on the two barges, said Honeywelll's John McAuliffe.

"You can't have people on deck of boat when there's water on that deck freezing," said McAuliffe, program director for the $450 million cleanup project.

The work will resume in April.

The cleanup project also involves covering about 450 acres of lake bottom with a layer of sand and dirt up to 3 feet thick. That capping operation, as it's called, will continue at a slower pace through the winter, Streitfeld said.

The capping is 17.5 percent complete and is expected to be finished in 2016, Streitfeld said.

Honeywell, under the authority of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, is overseeing the lake cleanup.